The Winchester Mystery House is a Gothic/Victorian architectural wonder filled with rich history. The house is located in San Jose, California, and is filled with what the name suggests: mysteries. Construction lasted almost 40 years, only ending when the owner passed, containing stairs that lead to nowhere, windows to brick walls, and doors to 15-foot drops. The Winchester House is also popularly known for its peculiar hauntings.
The Story of Sarah Winchester
The Winchester House first starts with its builder: Sarah Pardee Winchester, wife of William Wirt Winchester and heiress of the Winchester fortune. William was the son of Oliver Winchester, the man responsible for creating the Winchester Rifle company. Winchester rifles became known as “the Gun that Won the West” and were used widely across the world. William and Sarah had one child named Annie who died shortly after she was born, succumbing to her Marasmus, a disease causing severe nutrient deficiency and stunting growth in children. A while thereafter, William passed away from tuberculosis, leaving Sarah with the Winchester fortune, which was about $20 million or $520 million in modern money along with 50% equity of the company. Sarah also lost her sister, mother, father, and her father-in-law within a few years of each other.
As you could probably guess, Winchester rifles were quite popular during the Civil War. Due to the many deaths caused by said Civil War, many Americans began to turn to spiritualism, leading to an increase in the popularity of mediums and fortune tellers. Sarah, feeling guilty of all of the deaths caused by the WInchester company and influenced by this new flowering of spiritualism, also turned to a medium. This medium told her that the ghosts of those killed by her late father-in-law and husband’s rifles would come back to haunt her and she must build a house, and keep building a house, and keep building that house for eternity in order to confuse the ghosts and prevent the hauntings. At first, Sarah tried to escape the ghosts by moving from New Haven, Connecticut to San Jose, but the ghosts supposedly followed her there, causing the start of construction of the Winchester Mystery House.
Construction of the Winchester House
According to reports of the construction, for the next almost 40 years, the property was under construction 24/7, ending only after Sarah passed away in her sleep. The house was originally a two-story eight-room farmhouse, but today is a 6-story 160-room mansion containing 2000 doors, 10000 windows, 47 fireplaces, 17 chimneys, 40 stairways, 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one of which is still unfinished), 13 bathrooms, 6 kitchens, 3 elevators, 2 basements, and a wooden-paneled dining room. Due to the Great Earthquake of 1906, the 7th floor of the house collapsed along with a tower and many chimneys and was never rebuilt.
Many oddities of the Winchester House are “wrong”: doors leading to straight walls, windows facing the wrong way, and stairs leading to ceilings, but some of these features may have been for a reason. Sarah lived to be quite old for the century she lived in, passing away in her early 80s in the 1920s. Sarah was also under 5 feet and suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, both of which caused a restriction of her movement. Heat has been shown to temporarily relieve joint pain, which could be a reason for the many fireplaces and chimneys. It is also alleged that the “Switchback Staircase,” a staircase that has steps much smaller than the average stair and “switches back” several times, was created because Sarah could not lift her feet higher than two inches off the ground.
The house is currently described, architecturally, more specifically as a Queen Anne Revival house, which was a popular sub-type of Victorian houses.
The Hauntings
After Sarah’s death in 1922, the house was auctioned off to a man named John H. Brown. Brown and his wife ended up opening the Winchester House to the public later that year, but some peculiar details began to be noticed. The number 13 appeared all throughout the house: 13 hooks for jackets, 13 shower drains, and in the 13th bathroom; 13 windows. The public grew confused, finding the oddities of blocked-off doors, windows, etc. The house grew so famous for its mysteries that well-known escape artist Harry Houdini came to visit while on a tour trying to debunk spiritualism. Houdini left calling the house “of mysteries” and couldn’t delineate why the house was so strange. Ever since, several famous investigators have come to the Winchester House including the famed Zak Bagan, a modern paranormal investigator popular across the internet.
Reports of haunted activity say that lights flicker with no reason, visitors feel people tug on their sleeves only to find no one there, and some hear phantom footsteps. One spirit who is often seen rolling a wheelbarrow on property is supposedly the ghost of a man named Clyde, a previous worker of the Sarah’s. He is apparently a residual spirit, meaning he is still stuck in a sort of time loop. The most predominant ghost of the Winchester Mystery house goes unnamed but is often spotted in quick flashes peering through the windows of the house. Some say that this spirit is Sarah checking up on the house from the afterlife. Several other shadow-figure spirits are seen roaming throughout the house.
One of the most interesting mysteries that is alleged to be evidence of Sarah’s haunting is the mystery of the stained glass windows. After Sarah passed away, the answer to where her beautiful stained glass windows came from died along with her. This remained a mystery for 90 years, until a Canadian historical architect was employed to find the origins of another haunted mansion’s stained glass windows. This man noticed a connection between this house’s windows and the Winchester’s, looking in an almost identical style with slightly different designs. Eventually this man found the Pacific Glass Company of San Francisco and made a connection by designs, solving the mystery. Although he found the connection, there was no physical evidence showing the Pacific Glass Co.’s creation of the windows. Exactly one day later, some historians were working on a restoration project in one of the rooms. As they peeled back a layer of plaster, they found an almost mummified original envelope, perfectly preserved. The envelope was stamped from the Pacific American Decorative Co. of San Francisco, which was found to be the Pacific Glass Co. after its rebrand in 1893. This is said to be Sarah’s way of sharing where her windows were created from her place in the afterlife. The Winchester House website thinks that this is an unlikely coincidence that the letter was found the exact day after the architect shared his findings.
Other ghostly activities include music, unexplainable sounds, smells of food being cooked, cold spots, doors/windows slamming, and possibly the spookiest of all: the feeling that you are being watched.
Today
Today, the Winchester Mystery House has been heavily restored but is still kept with Victorian-style furniture. It is (still, of course) in San Jose, California and is still open for tours today. At just over an hour-long, you will see 110 of the 160 rooms of the Winchester House. Across the internet, even still today, several paranormal investigators investigate the house.
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